COMMISSIONED POEMS FOR THE BOOK OF ST ANDREWS


This project celebrates the place where The Poetry House is located: the Scottish town of St Andrews.

The Book of St Andrews (to be published in book form by Polygon in Summer 2005) is an anthology of imaginative writing which is arranged like St Andrews itself, where you can find an Art Deco cinema, a late medieval spire, and a 1970s residential block all on the same street. The Book of St Andrews juxtaposes poems, stories, and memoirs with scant regard to chronological order, but in the confidence that each contribution, lively in its own right, may also enhance the others. The anthology includes work produced in four different millennia, and for a number of today's writers, such as Sarah Hall, A. L. Kennedy, Paul Muldoon, and Seamus Heaney, St Andrews remains a place haunted, sometimes even scarred, by the past — a 'Reformation bombsite', in Les Murray's memorable phrase. But the new work made for this project also suggests by its very existence that St Andrews is a point of fresh growth, a big village where remarkable and unexpected things can happen at the drop of a hat.

The selection of specially commissioned poems on this website is intended to give a flavour of the contemporary poetry that appears in the published volume alongside older poetry and prose — from Gavin Douglas to Edwin Muir. What follows is an extract from the introduction to the book.

Miles beyond the end of the railway line, a tiny town containing one of Europe's senior universities, part of its grassy coastline celebrated round the world as the fons et origo of golf, St Andrews is an almost impossible place. Its assets are unique and improbable. Despite its size, it has its own castle and cathedral, theatre and galleries, pier, pubs, and Poetry House. In this northern speck, over the centuries, the contested identity of Scotland has been made manifest. Pilgrims trekked here in the Middle Ages; Robert the Bruce prayed in its great cathedral; the Scottish Reformation tore the place apart, and people were burned alive in its streets; later, suffragettes set light to some of its buildings, and, during the decline and fall of the British Empire, 'retired pro-consuls', as Willa Muir puts it, 'were heard in loud voices referring to the townsfolk as "the natives"'. Since at least the eighteenth century, when Robert Fergusson (Robert Burns's favourite Scottish poet) was a St Andrews student, the place has been involved in arguments about the Anglicization of Scottish culture. The languages used regularly in St Andrews have included Gaelic and Latin, Scots, English, and French, not to mention other tongues such as the Polish of the exiles who came here at the time of the Second World War, some returning to Poland to fight in the Warsaw Uprising, others going to America or settling in St Andrews itself. There is a Polish inscription in one of the St Andrews public parks, and the Town Hall mosaic made by Polish soldier-artists is but one emblem of the town's internationalism. In the 1930s, though none of today's blue plaques announces the fact, St Andrews was an important site on the map of Scottish cultural and political nationalism, a meeting place for writers, artists, and composers whose outlook was both nationalist and internationally alert; in the 1970s, in rather different circumstances, it nurtured several influential thinkers of the political right. In the twenty-first century St Andrews is more cosmopolitan than ever, but also more inclusively and resolutely Scottish, a place that, however small, has set its face against Anglophobia and Little Scotlandism. It is, like its nation, independent-minded. It can be smug and thrawnly parochial, but is also nimble and adaptable, a site of ambitious antiquity where the future can be dreamed and invented. That is one reason why it has been so attractive to writers, of whom St Andrews, over the last six centuries at least, has educated or played host to more than its fair share.

True, the place has disgraced itself. In 1746, just after the Battle of Culloden, the university made the young 'Butcher' Cumberland its Chancellor, and a little over half a century later the poet and orientalist John Leyden thought the town 'for dancing, cards, golf, scandal, and drunkenness almost the capital of Scotland'. Yet this was also the era when the university awarded an honorary degree to Benjamin Franklin, when its student James Wilson helped shape the American Declaration of Independence, and when Dr Johnson considered the town 'eminently adapted to study and education'. Again, if the twentieth century saw the writers Willa and Edwin Muir and the American Scottish nationalist James H. Whyte cold-shouldered by the snootier members of the community, it also saw the later founding in St Andrews of Scotland's Poetry Festival, StAnza, and the appointment of a number of leading writers to the permanent staff of the university's School of English. Sometimes the place gets things right.

MEG BATEMAN

AIG FÈIS BÀRDACHD CILL RÌMHINN

Bha mi air mo dhòigh am bàrd fhaicinn
ach cha chuala mi gu ceart e
leis mar a thàinig mi a-steach fadalach
is mar a bh’ agam ri suidhe aig a’ chùl
is nighean an dorais rim thaobh,
’ s i a’ cùnntadh an airgid-inntrigidh…

Ach tha mi taingeil gun deach mi ann
air sgàth na chuala mi air mo shlighe
air rèidio a’ chàir: cuideigin ag ràdh
nach e an toileachas dìth a’ chràidh
ach a’ mhisneachd a bhith gabhail ris a’ chràdh
is a’ mhisneachd a bhith a’ cumail a’ dol…

’ S mar a dh’fhàg mi dubhar nan coilltean air mo chùlaibh,
is mi tèarnadh dhan bhaile dheàrrsach eagarra ud
air rathaidean gu h-obann leathann, soilleir,
bha e mar gu robh mi a’ dràibheadh meatafor,
mar gu robh mi fhìn a’ gabhail pàirt
ann an taisbeanadh de chiùineas.


AT ST ANDREWS POETRY FESTIVAL

I was pleased to get to hear the poet,
yet somehow I didn’t
what with arriving late
and having to sit at the back
where the girl at the door
was counting the takings…

But I’m glad I went
for the radio talk I heard on my way
in the car: someone saying that
happiness is not the absence of pain
but the courage to accept pain,
and the courage to move on…

And as I left dark woods behind me
and swept down to that shining town
on roads suddenly straight and broad,
I seemed to be driving a metaphor,
myself caught up
in some revelation of calm.

MEG BATEMAN was born in 1959 and grew up in Edinburgh. Her collections of poetry include Aotromachd agus dàin eile/ Lightness and other poems (Polygon, 1997). She is a Senior Lecturer at the Gaelic college, Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, on Skye, and an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of English at the University of St Andrews.

THOMAS A. CLARK

THE PIER WALK

a few steps
will bring you out
into air and light

take it easy
don’t hurry ahead
in anticipation

through a contrary
movement of water
you walk on stone

you are one alone
careless
yet having care

not to go
straight forward
but to be
straightforward

in a strict occasion
of shifting water
light and air

THOMAS A. CLARK's collections of poetry include Tormentil and Bleached Bones (Polygon, 1993). Originally from Greenock, he now lives in Fife. His poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies in Britain, the US, and continental Europe, as well as in small editions from his own Moschatel Press.

ANNA CROWE

OTHER WINDOWS

1. Gregory’s window

Tick-tack escapement like a jittery wren,
his clock beside the open window dissects
the sunset into gaudy thirds of seconds.

Four years since a freak spring blizzard wiped out
the eclipse, his plans… but now his hopes veer south
like winter geese, warm themselves with the thought

of this clear sky. And when earth’s shadow cloaks
the moon, Huygens in Paris and he, their clocks
according as their minds, their lenses locked

on that pocked face, will chart the eclipse and mark
when the stars cut the meridian; stark
on Scoonie’s ridge his marker’s iron spike

rises. The academie is a darkened house—
shuttered rooms; wee closets stuffed with wondrous
impertinence; pensit scholars who purse

their lips and turn their backs; who won’t let in
the sun. Let others judge his work: Huygens
and he, their clocks, this night the meridian’s

place in time will find; his Differential
Calculus Newton has. On Scoonie Hill
the ploughman and his horse trudge home, and all

waits on the rising moon… a band of wood
glimmers along his line of longitude;
his marker’s moved downhill from where it stood

to make room for the plough, and gulls are blown
like feathers on the wind when Scoonie’s man
goes mapping earth with straight lines of his own.


2. The sea-room

From your room at the back of the Library
we can look across to a large house on the Scores
and through the windows of one room

to the sea. The effect is strange—the second frame
so finely aligned behind the first
as to be cancelled out.

Gazing into that blue space, we feel
the dislocation almost as vertigo,
our eyes pulled seaward against our will.

And suddenly the whole handsome pile
of Scottish Baronial is only frontage,
a sea-wall, the room gone—

as though the fierceness of those ancient fires
at either end of the street had sucked the breath
out of it: east, outside the Castle, GW

monograms Wishart the Reformer’s death
into the fabric of the town; west,
anonymous as ash, those women

burnt at Bow Butts by reforming prelates
for being old or ill. The “Witches’ Tour”
blows on those embers for the tourist trade

with caperings at dusk in fancy-dress.
This is the hour the town dreams itself elsewhere.
And should some figure cross the window

we sense how flat it is—a shadow-
puppet cast by the clock-face moon
and twitched by memory’s finger—

Hackie’s shade, bent double over his broom,
sweeping the windy streets, as though the town
were twinned with old Vitebsk, and he

a creature of Chagall’s imagining.
Or if a moony lamp shines there
we know a boat has cut its motor

and drifted in, bow-lantern lit, to lift
the crab- and lobster-pots where a marker floats
among the drowned armchairs and sofas.

In the sea-room the sea-wrack curtains wave,
an Aubusson leaching blue into the tide,
a bootlace-worm curled-up inside a shoe.

Dog-whelk and periwinkle slowly graze
along the skerries’ shelves, and groping through
the rusty springs the blushing starfish breed.

Note:— Hackie: George Hackerson, a pensioner employed by Henderson’s, the former booksellers in Church Street, during the sixties.


3. The View from the Open Window
in memory of Irene (Bessie) Barker d. 22.12.2003, painter, sculptor, gardener

We can tell from the way the cat is painted—
some quality of stillness—
that just beyond the open window
unseen birds are singing.

Your wedding-present, painted for us
when Bonnard had burst on to our horizons,
has been the other window
in every sitting-room we’ve owned or rented.

Evenings we’ve drawn the blinds, and turned
to lean out of your painting
into France, smelling the pines, careful
not to wake Marthe, asleep in her blue chair.

Come April in St Andrews, when trees
this side of the Botanic Garden wear only
a green haze, the view from my study turns into
The View from the Open Window,

a tide of Sap Green breaking into leaf,
your hands busy again among branches,
mixing Vivid Green and Bronze Yellow
to paint in a tender froth of plane and chestnut;

your fingers quick among wych-elm, willow,
with slips of Cadmium Green Pale;
coaxing the pitch at Cockshaugh Park
to a field of Terre Verte.

April skies in Fife now borrow
the Bleu Lumière of the south, our afternoons
Ultramarine; evenings, there’s a hint
of the Estérel between the pines.

On the Lade Braes, a missel-thrush
sings from winter’s apple-tree,
carving its harsh, unlovely song
from wind and snow.

ANNA CROWE comes originally from Plymouth and now lives in St Andrews. A poet, translator, and creative-writing tutor, she has served as Artistic Director of StAnza, Scotland's poetry festival. Her collections of poetry include Skating Out of the House (Peterloo, 1997) and A Secret History of Rhubarb (Mariscat Press, 2004).

SEAMUS HEANEY

TO THE POETS OF ST ANDREWS
adapted from the lost original ‘Ut in Lusitania olim miles …’ attributed to Arthur Johnston (1587-1641)

As when in Lusitania once the legions
Stood under halted standards by Lima River
And refused to wade across the water north
To make war on the clans because the clans
Had spread a rumour that Lethe flowed to Ocean
By way of those clear, gravel-chattering fords
And silent bends, one veteran commander
(To show this was no bourne of forgetfulness)
Splashed into the shallows and kept going
Under his campaign gear, his spear-shaft firm
As his grasp on memory when he’d got across
And started to call back name after Roman name
Of his sweltering comrades,
So I
Who instead of spear-shaft grasp my crummock
And step wet from a ferry south of Forth
Recall your poets’ names, in wind-borne Latin
Ut in Lusitania olim miles …

SEAMUS HEANEY was born in County Derry, Northern Ireland, in 1939 and awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. Among his collections of poetry are Death of a Naturalist (1966), Field Work (1979), and Seeing Things (1991). In 1996 for the St Andrews Scottish Studies Institute he delivered one in the series of Robert Burns Bicentenary Lectures which were later published as Robert Burns and Cultural Authority (Polygon, 1999). In 1999 for the School of English he delivered the George Jack Memorial Lecture in St Andrews. He was awarded an honorary degree of DLitt by the University of St Andrews in 2005.

ANDREW B. JACKSON

from APOCRYPHA

The Apocalypse of Judas,
chapter thirteen, verse
something-or-other:

as cows feed on clover,
crows on earthworms,
so men desire digestive charms.

It is beauty sustains us . . .
lean cuts from the Cross,
Italian shoes.

Therefore avoid St Andrews,
its burnt crust of a castle,
golf ball truffles,

the West Sands
a mouth-watering prospect for the damned.

ANDREW B. JACKSON was born in Glasgow in 1965, grew up in Bramhall, Cheshire, and received his secondary education at Bell Baxter High School in Cupar, before going to Edinburgh University. His first collection of poetry, Fire Stations, was published by Anvil in 2003. He lives in Glasgow.

KATHLEEN JAMIE

THE PUDDLE
St Andrews

A week’s worth of rain
musters in play-parks;
pools in hollow
low-lying fields

signal come-hither
to oystercatchers; curlews
insert like thermometers
their elegant bills.

What is it to lie so
level with the world,
to encourage the eye
-for-the-main-chance

black-headed gulls,
goal-posts, willows,
purple-bellied clouds
to inhabit us, briefly

upside down? Is it written
that we with a few
years left, God willing,
must stake our souls

upright within us
as the grey-hackled heron
by a pond’s rim,
constantly forbidding

the setting winter sun
to scald us beautifully,
ruby and carnelion?
Flooded fields, all pulling

the same lustrous trick,
that flush in the world’s light
as though with sudden love —
how should we live?

KATHLEEN JAMIE was born in Johnstone, Renfrewshire, in 1962, and studied Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She is a Reader in English at the University of St Andrews, where she teaches creative writing and Scottish literature. Her Selected Poems appeared from Bloodaxe in 2002 with the title Mr and Mrs Scotland are Dead and her most recent collection is The Tree House (Picador, 2004). Her prose books include Among Muslims (Sort of Books, 2002) and Findings (Sort of Books, 2005).

PAUL MULDOON

HEDGE SCHOOL

Not only those rainy mornings our great-great-grandmother was posted at a gate
with a rush mat
over her shoulders, a mat that flashed
Papish like a heliograph, but those rainy mornings when my daughter and the rest

of her all-American Latin class may yet be forced to conjugate
Guantanamo, amas, amat
and learn with Luciana how ‘headstrong liberty is lash’d
with woe’ — all past and future mornings were impressed

on me just now, dear sis,
as I sheltered in a doorway on Church Street in St. Andrews
(where, in 673, another Maelduin was bishop),

and tried to come up with a ruse
for unsealing the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary back in that corner shop
and tracing the root of metastasis.

PAUL MULDOON was born in Moy, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, in 1951. Educated at the Queen's University, Belfast, he worked for the BBC in Northern Ireland until 1985. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is Howard G. B. Clark Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. He is also an Honorary Professor in the School of English, University of St Andrews. His Poems 1968-1998 was published by Faber in 2001, and followed by Moy Sand and Gravel (Faber, 2002).

DON PATERSON

OLD MAN UNDER AN APPLE TREE, EAST SCORES
after Quasimodo

I will know nothing of my life but its mysteries,
the dead cycles of the breath and sap.
I shall not know whom I loved, or love,
now that in the random winds of March
with nothing but my limbs, I draw into myself
and the years counted deep in me.
The thin blossom is already streaming from the boughs.

DON PATERSON was born in Dundee in 1963. His collections of poetry include Nil Nil (Faber, 1993), God's Gift to Women (Faber, 1997), The Eyes (Faber, 1999), and Landing Light (Faber, 2003). A musician, anthologist, and wit, he holds a Lectureship in the School of English, University of St Andrews, where he teaches creative writing, poetry, and Scottish Studies.

TOM POW

ST ANDREWS

I am sitting in Pitigliano —
that human doocot, perched

on a spur of Tuscan rock —
thinking about St Andrews.

It’s not so hard. February
in Tuscany’s not how the pictures

play in your mind. I’ve seen
the charm of small-town piazzas

drabbed by a relentless
East coast rain and otherwise

delightful alleys so grey and cold
you’d think them splashed with salt.

But, this evening, the day turned
and, from the valley of the Meleta,

Pitigliano appeared to float
on its honeyed rock against

a properly azure sky.
In memory, once again, I saw

how St Andrews would likewise
stoke up all the clarity

an East coast day could offer,
till the town, miraculously, rose

on a bed of its very own golden
Tuscan light. At such times,

from within the warmth
of its evening walls, I’d hear

ringing out soundlessly —
over cornfields, turnip drills and sea —

the ghostly grey finger
of its ruined campanile.

TOM POW was born in Edinburgh in 1950. He studied English at St Andrews University, and now teaches creative writing at Glasgow University's Crichton Campus in Dumfries. His collections of poetry include Rough Seas (Canongate, 1987), The Moth Trap (Canongate, 1990), and Landscapes and Legacies (inyx, 2003).